Autodesk invites users to remix training materials

Design software giant Autodesk will announce Tuesday that it has made a batch of training materials available under Creative Commons licensing, as part of a larger plan to eventually make all its support and learning documents free to use, share and, in most cases, alter.

It's an all-too-rare move among corporations, but ideally one that gets other companies thinking about whether locking down so much of their intellectual property actually makes sense.

"For a company as prominent as Autodesk to do this, it sends an important signal to other major players: We think that's a service to our customers we want to provide," said Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Hopefully other companies will then take a look and say, 'Maybe we should do that too.' "

The first release includes 20,000 pages of documentation, 70 videos and 140 downloaded 3-D files for the company's media and entertainment division, which produces the 3-D computer graphics software Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, among others. These tools are used to create visual effects and animation for movies, TV shows and video games, notably including the "Iron Man" series, "Life of Pi," "Man of Steel" and "Game of Thrones."

Can be shared

Previously, some of the support materials were freely available while some only came with the purchase of the software. But even paying customers were not technically allowed to share those materials or manipulate them in any way. Under the Creative Commons licenses that Autodesk is using, people can now download and repost the videos or documents in other forums.

In most cases, they'll also be able to change the materials, say, by annotating training books with pictures, using pieces of the videos in classroom presentations or translating documents into other languages.

Indeed, part of the reason Autodesk made this decision is that a multimedia instructor at the Collège Communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick wanted to translate video from the Autodesk 3ds Max Learning Channel into French for his students. In turn, he hoped to make what he created available to others. Under traditional copyright rules, he simply wasn't allowed to, despite the obvious benefit to all parties involved.

Legitimizing it allows Autodesk to tap into the wisdom - and labor - of the crowd, making their materials more effective and useful.

"People would love to transform in some way the tremendous amount of learning and training materials that we develop - translate in language, tweak slightly for curriculum that exactly serves the target audience," said Chris Bradshaw, senior vice president at Autodesk. "But without these licenses, they technically can't do that."

Autodesk benefits

Anyone trying to learn how to use these complex and powerful software tools benefits from having more of this information in more forms in the public realm. But Autodesk, located in San Rafael and with a large San Francisco presence, is the beneficiary as well: The more people who learn their software, the more paying customers they wind up with over the long term.

"We're highly motivated to have as many people as possible learning our products, whether it's students or professionals," Bradshaw said.

In further pursuit of that goal, Autodesk makes its software available free to any current student. Earlier this year, Autodesk also contributed money to the Creative Commons organization at what's called the innovator level, which means $10,000 to $29,999.

Despite the potential bottom-line benefits, though, embracing Creative Commons is still rare among businesses. Most give in to the corporate reflex to protect everything under copyright. Indeed, in an increasingly digital world, copyright protections are often triggered by default.

Nonprofit's purpose

That's one of the key reasons why the Creative Commons nonprofit, based in Mountain View, was set up in 2001. It created a series of legal mechanisms that allow content owners to share their songs, videos and more for free, while enabling some restrictions on their use.

Certain versions of the license require attribution, ban the material's use for commercial work or restrict it from being changed. Autodesk applies the former two in all cases and the last in some.

While the corporate world takes tentative steps here, many artists and institutions have been taking full advantage of these options.

MIT used CC licenses to set up the OpenCourseWare site offering more than 2,000 courses available for free.

Performer Amanda Palmer releases all her music under this mechanism, and prominent artists including R.E.M. and Paul Simon have used it to conduct remix contests.

In addition, several years ago, animator Nina Paley released her film "Sita Sings the Blues" as Creative Commons. It layered the traditional Indian epic tale of Ramayana, the music of Jazz Age singer Annette Hanshaw and Paley's own tale of heartbreak into a film that the late critic Roger Ebert called "astonishingly original."

"From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes," Paley wrote at the time.